The Linux-based living room gaming announcements Valve co-founder Gabe Newell promised last week began today with the unveiling of SteamOS, a new Linux-based operating system focused on living room gaming.

"As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself," Valve wrote on a page announcing the upcoming OS. "SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines."

Why a new OS? Valve says that with SteamOS, the company has "achieved significant performance increases in graphics processing, and we’re now targeting audio performance and reductions in input latency at the operating system level." The Linux-based platform will also be freely licensable to hardware manufacturers, allowing a wide number of "Steam Box" living room PCs to germinate. Newell has previously called Windows 8 a "catastrophe" for the gaming market, so it's not at all surprising that his company decided to move forward with a more open option under its direct control.

With the vast majority of Steam's thousands of games currently designed to run only on Windows and/or Mac, compatibility is obviously a major concern with any Linux-based system. Valve says that "hundreds" of games are currently running on their new OS (presumably building off current Steam for Linux compatibility) and promises that the coming weeks will see many AAA game announcements with native SteamOS support in 2014 (when living room systems with SteamOS are expected to launch). The OS will also support the full Steam catalog through "in-home streaming," which presumably means remote play from an office PC to a living room TV over a home router.

SteamOS will be fully compatible with existing Steam functions like automatic game updates across machines, Steam Workshop add-ons and marketplaces, in-game chat and friends lists, family sharing across multiple accounts, and more, according to Valve. In addition, Valve says it's "working with many of the media services you know and love" to bring unspecified online music, TV, and movie services to the new OS.

Promoted Comments

Linux is the future of gaming, so long as it is no longer called Linux, is locked down from outside control, and will stream stuff from the Steam Store (but no word of streaming games purchased through GoG or other vendors?

Let me put it this way: if and when Steam allows other storefronts without SteamOS, then I will believe the cries of "open source" were anything but marketing material.

I like the concept of having a solid target for game developers that is a known quantity in the living room, outside of the current players.

I see Nvidia/AMD throwing more $$ at linux driver support, simply because they'll sell more hardware because of it.

The open nature of the OS, unlike Xbone / PS4 will allow me to do other things I wouldn't normally be able to do without hacking / modding the console (MKV / Samba support, etc.)

There just seems like so much upside to this, its exciting. It's also risky...but I think if the hardware is done right for the "mainstream" people, along with me being able to build my own machine...it will work out well.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in Pittsburgh, PA.